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                                                                                SPECIAL ISSUE: MILLENNIUM -- BEYOND THE YEAR 2000 

LOOKING BACK, Page 27

The Astonishing 20th Century


For good and ill, people of our time have witnessed more change
than anyone who ever lived

BY PAUL GRAY


    The 20th century began slowly, to the ticking of grandfather
clocks and the stately rhythms of progress established by high
Victorian seriousness. Thanks to science, industry and moral
philosophy, mankind's steps had at last been guided unerringly
up the right path. The century of steam was about to give way
to the century of oil and electricity, new and transforming
sources of power and light. Charles Darwin's theory of
evolution, only 41 years old in 1900, proposed a scientific
basis for the notion that progress was gradual but inevitable,
ordained by natural law.

    And everything argued that such development would continue
in the small, incremental steps that had marked the progress of
much of the 19th century. Inventions like the railroad or the
telegraph or the typewriter had enabled people to get on with
their ordinary lives a little more conveniently. The news, in
1901, that an Italian physicist named Guglielmo Marconi had
received wireless telegraphic messages sent from Cornwall to
Newfoundland was hailed as a triumph, but few discerned its
full meaning: the birth of a communications revolution. Rather,
it was another welcome convenience.

    No one could have guessed then that, in the century just
dawning, new ideas would burst upon the world with a force and
frequency that would turn this stately march of progress into a
long-distance, free-for-all sprint. Thrust into this race, the
children of the 20th century would witness more change in their
daily existence and environment than anyone else who had ever
walked the planet.

    This high-velocity onslaught of new ideas and technologies
seemed to ratify older dreams of a perfectible life on earth, of
an existence in which the shocks of nature had been tamed. But
the unleashing of unparalleled progress was also accompanied by
something quite different: a massive regression toward savagery.
If technology endowed humans with Promethean aspirations and
powers, it also gave them the means to exterminate one another.

    Those means did not for long remain unemployed.
Assassinations in Sarajevo in 1914 lit a spark that set off an
unprecedented explosion of destruction and death. The Great War
did more than devastate a generation of Europeans. It set the
tone -- the political, moral and intellectual temper -- for
much that followed. Once the carnage (more than 8.5 million
military deaths alone) had ended, the tectonic aftershocks began
to reverberate around the world.

    The war hastened the already simmering Russian Revolution
and the founding of the Soviet Union and, hence, that protracted
standoff between vast swatches of the planet that came to be
called the cold war. It foretold the beginning of the end of
European overseas expansion. And the U.S., against many of its
instincts, became a superpower.

    Before long, the Great War received a new name: World War I.
The roaring 1920s and the Depression years of the 1930s proved
to be merely a lull in the fighting, a prelude to World War II.
Largely hidden during that war was an awful truth that called
into question progress and the notion of human nature itself.
Even now, the Holocaust -- an industry set up for the purpose
of slaughtering human beings -- remains incomprehensible.

    But civilization was not crushed by the two great wars, and
the rubble provided the impetus to build a way of life again --
and this time to try to build it better. To a degree previously
unheard of and perhaps unimaginable, the citizens of the 20th
century felt free, or even fated, to reinvent themselves. In
that task they were assisted by two profound but unsettling
developments, both of them conceived, oddly enough, before the
Great War began. A Viennese physician named Sigmund Freud
altered the way people would come to see themselves, their
emotions, desires and dreams. And a gentle German-born patent
examiner named Albert Einstein thought up an entirely new shape
for reality itself -- and opened the door to the Bomb.

    At the beginning of the century, people had inherited a
world in which household electricity was a luxury, an
automobile an object of curiosity, recreation a trip to a
concert or vaudeville show. As the century progressed, these
same people witnessed unparalleled explosions of technical
advances. Recorded music began to proliferate. Silent films
acquired plots and, later, became talkies. Radio took off in the
1920s and led to television, which transformed the American
family's idea of leisure and entertainment. Cars ran off the
assembly line by the tens of thousands, launching the great
American love affair with the auto. It took scarcely 30 years
from the Wright brothers' first powered flight at Kitty Hawk,
North Carolina, to the launching of the first large airliner for
civilian traffic, and less than that until jet aircraft had made
much of the globe less than a day away from most airports. The
power and sophistication of computers enabled people to work and
think in previously unexplored ways. And then there was space
travel, interplanetary probes, geosynchronous communication
satellites.

    Relief from disease, the fearsome companion of centuries,
arrived with the application of chemical research to healing
and preventive medicine. The most impressive, far-reaching book
of the 20th century is its pharmacopoeia, the list of wonder
drugs that have changed the tenor of human existence. During the
span of a single lifetime, science learned to cure or prevent
through vaccination a staggering list of plagues, ranging from
syphilis and gonorrhea to typhoid and polio.

    Constant innovations and culture shocks had startling
effects on the 20th century consciousness. The belief -- or
faith -- that science can meet all challenges was coupled with
the sense that science also creates plenty of problems.
Constant change, for example, has had a deracinating effect.
Traditional loyalties and ties have all been challenged or
superseded by the allure of the new. As technology's blessings
have spread, so have anxieties, the sense that some vital
control over individual destiny has been ceded to impersonal
forces.

    The art of the 20th century, particularly in its first five
decades, impressively reflected and helped shape the
sensibilities of an age that saw itself as distinct, cut off
from its past. "These fragments I have shored against my
ruins," wrote T.S. Eliot in The Waste Land (1922), the poem that
most typifies its age. A similar attitude prevailed among a
number of revolutionary artists: Picasso in art, Stravinsky in
music, Joyce in literature, Balanchine in ballet and Mies Van
Der Rohe in architecture. Each of these men mastered the
techniques of his trade and then saw fit to wrench old forms
into previously unheard-of shapes.

    In the wake of this movement, which came to be known as
Modernism, an entirely different tendency arose. The Modernists
had been elitist, scornful of mass values and tastes. Now their
worst nightmares came true. Postwar culture after 1945 began to
drown Modernism in a torrent of mass entertainment, facilitated
by film, TV, records and a host of allied electronic
innovations. At the same time, during the '50s and '60s, a form
of institutionalized rebellion took hold among the world's
youth as a cultural norm. The old, normal urge to flout
authority was greatly magnified and aided by the ubiquity of
mass culture.

    As this flood of sensory stimuli grew, the very notion of
"high" art began to be questioned. The new cultural icons,
including pioneers like Elvis and the Beatles, were immediately
accessible and understandable. Even while it splintered into
different subgenres, rock music spread around the world,
dominating record sales and the airwaves. Pop culture's
frenzied quest for the new and the shocking continued to make
traditionalists blanch, but the beat and the noise went on.

    In one respect, at least, the century provided a complete,
old-fashioned story, one with a beginning, a middle and an end.
The collapse of the Soviet Union in late 1991 settled the cold
war, that long, Manichaean, superpower struggle between two
opposing philosophies of governance. The suppression of
individual liberties in the service of a common good stood
exposed as hollow, inefficient and, most damning of all,
corrupt.

    But the moral of this story remains untold. With their
adamantine enemy suddenly broken, liberal democracies found
themselves groping after the certainties that their peers of
100 years ago had taken for granted. The tools for engineering
longer, more comfortable lives have increased exponentially,
but the ends for which such improvements are intended are still
unclear. More shopping malls? Ever greater material abundance
ripped from a depleted earth? All of this has sharpened and
brought into higher focus a question as old as the dawn of
philosophy: What is life for and why are we here to lead it?
Thanks to this amazing age, more people than ever before have
the freedom to ask the question for themselves.